[Illustration] LXXX A HOSPITAL SHIP AT A BASE The ship’s large wooden Red Cross, to be illuminated at night with electric lights, is seen near the centre of the drawing. [Illustration] [Illustration] THE BRITISH NAVY AND THE WESTERN FRONT Our Western front is a line that does not really end at the sea. If it did, then its left flank might be turned. But its real left flank is not there. It is somewhere far out on a line that runs north-west of Nieuport, through and beyond the North Sea. The British soldier in Belgium or France may not see much of the Navy itself. But every day brings him some proof that the Navy is holding its part of the line. His letters never go wrong, and he knows that, but for the Fleet, they would have to make their way to him like swimmers across a bay full of sharks. It is faith in the Navy that makes the men going on leave laugh when obeying the order to put on lifebelts on leaving harbour. In the soldier’s mind that long left flank of our line is not forgotten but rather written off, once for all, as unbreakable. He puts much the same sort of trust in the power of the Fleet as he puts in the affection of friends at home. To him it is one of the things that need never be feared for; it cannot fail. This is not to say that soldiers underrate the hardness of the Navy’s task. A few sailors visit the front from time to time and hold curious arguments with the soldiers, each side being deeply convinced that the other has the harder time of it. The soldier’s imagination is struck by the large proportion of deaths among the casualties of naval war and by visions of night duty on vessels at sea in bad winter weather. What strikes the sailor, in presence of the imperfections of dug-outs, is the soldier’s hardship of not being able to “go below” into some small cubic space of warmth and dryness when action is over or a watch is through. When a naval officer, who visited the Somme front last summer, and saw a fight near Martinpuich, rejoined the ship that he commanded, he paraded his whole ship’s company and spent two hours in telling them what a rough time the soldiers had, and what fine work they were doing. The generosity of the praise made his soldier guide feel almost ashamed, remembering the almost instant fate of the “Cressy,” “Aboukir,” and “Hogue,” and the obedience of the “Theseus” to the heart-breaking order to abandon her sinking consort.